Part Two: The Con Artist Who Invented A Country

Robert is joined again by Laci Mosley to continue to discuss conman, Gregor MacGregor.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
And it's another episode of a podcast that I do.
I have forgotten which one. Sophie, what is my job? You?
You you are a professional podcaster you hosted That does
not sound right. I know even when I said it,
I was like, yeah, you're Robert Evans, the host of

(00:26):
Behind the Bastards, a show about the work history and today. Oh,
I forgot it because of the head injuries. Um well,
then I guess I should read this script that someone
has handed me. Uh and the script says that my
guest today is Lacy. Mostly script is right. Oh, I
love a manufactured Jamaican air horn. It's my favorite. Yeah. Yeah, no,

(00:51):
there's no air horn like the one you pretend to
make with your mouth. So, Lacy, how's it going. Let's
say I assume because it's minutes after we recorded the
first episode, it's going good. It's nice to talk to people.
Like on days where I have lots of podcasts, I'm like, oh,
this is gonna be a long day. But then I'm like, oh,
it's just talking to people I like, so then it's great. Yeah,

(01:15):
you know, I uh. I don't have many social outlets
these days because of the plague and being an introvert.
So yes, I too, I too get all of my
social life by talking about con men with my friends
over the internet. So thank you for being my con

(01:35):
man friend. Yes, I love this. Wait were you doing
lots of socializing before COVID? I feel like you know. No, no, no,
I was mostly hiding in a fortified compact anyway. So
when Gregor McGregor traveled back to London in one he
brought back with him his wife in a scheme that
was on the surface very silly. The land that he

(01:56):
had been given was beautiful, but again worthless from a
financial perspective. It was a bad place to grow. It
was completely uncultivated, so discovering like whatever resources might be
there would take lifetime's worth of work. You'd have to
cut through miles of jungle to even do anything. There
were natives there, but none of the kind of cultivated
infrastructure that Europeans looked for in colonial prospects. Remember, the
most successful colonies that Europeans took were in places where

(02:18):
like locals had been doing ship for a while, like
food was growing, like ship was They kind of had
to just move in. And this is not that this
is like, this is actual uncultivated country. None of this
matter to Gregor, obviously, because he had no plan in
doing anything employer. His plan was to lie and pretend
it was an actual independent nation, filled with riches and

(02:41):
fertile land and friendly natives eager to learn from British
civil Friendly natives, you know, natives we love when when
the Brits come and take all our ship and give
us us They love it. Oh that doesn't sound like
the British name. More than forty times they did that.
Come all, we're here, we we love to see it.

(03:03):
So uh yeah. He his plan was to drum up
a media frenzy around his new country and Great Britain
and sell plots of land back to Global Rubes. And
then it wasn't really clear what he planned to do
after that, but it was like, if you've seen the
monorail episode of The Simpsons, that's kind of what he
was going for. It seems like. So as it happened,
Gregor landed in London during the best possible time to

(03:25):
sell a fake Latin American nation idiots. And I'm going
to explain how this scheme got off the ground, but
first I'm gonna have to walk you through how stock
trading worked in the eighteen twenties. And this is a
funner story than you might expect. So the idea of
trading stocks is still pretty new in the eighteen twenties.
People have not been doing it in like a kind
of recognizable modern way for a long time. The whole

(03:45):
concept had arisen in London during the time of Queen Elizabeth,
the first out of what was called merchant banking, the
selling and trading of various commodities. Now this took off
in the Aisles because the continent of Europe's but basically
the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds fighting a bunch of
horribly bloody wars, and the men who profited from those
wars did all of their financial gambling in London because

(04:06):
London was safe. Right, people aren't getting over to England
into when they're fighting. Um, so it's a pretty good
place to do your trading. Uh So. It was an
English bank that managed the fifteen million dollar loan that
let the US by Louisiana, And it was Rothschild's bank
that loaned Britain and her allies more than a hundred
million pounds during the Napoleonic wars. Now, when those wars ended,

(04:27):
the situations kind of like it was for the US
and World War Two, where everyone else is devastated and
the British are doing all right, um, and they kind
of like wind up holding everybody's money at the end
of that war. Uh. And so with the fighting over,
you had all these rich guys who had more money
than ever and they wanted to make even more money
with that, because that's the only thing rich guys do
with huge piles of money. So they want to do, yeah,

(04:48):
their hoarders, and they want to like make more money
and they so they want to like gamble on something.
And the Royal Exchange had for decades kind of handled
that gambling. But by the end of the Napoleonic Wars,
there's way too much money for this tiny little exchange
to handle and there was no like real regulation and
this this had started to become a problem. They were
all these frauds and conman and uh, yeah, people were

(05:11):
worried that the entire economy was going to collapse under
like a whole bunch of giant grifts. And this had
happened before, and it kind of happened repeatedly. As soon
as people started trading stocks. UH. In seventeen twenty, there
was something called the south Sea Bubble. This started when
the south Sea Company bribed the British government with millions
of dollars in exchange for monopoly and South American trade. UH.

(05:32):
The government needed that money for a different war with France,
so they passed a bill to make this legal um
and suddenly all like the south Sea Company stock rises
to ten times its value, and all these Englishmen see
like it's like with bitcoin, suddenly like oh my god,
that got worth so much more overnight. Something else has
got to be like that. What if I invest in
something else and then I can get rich too, And
so there's like anyway, speculation starts running wild and people

(05:54):
start investing in some really stupid ship. And I'm gonna
quote from a write up in Historic UK here speculation
ran wild, and all sorts of companies, some lunatics, some
fraudulent or just optimistic, were launched. For example, one company
floated was to buy the Irish bogs. Another was to
manage manufacture a gun to fire square cannon balls, and
most ludicrous at all quote this was an investment at

(06:16):
the time for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage,
but no one to know what it is. Yes, that's
not how to scam silicon. Then they're like, if we
tail you, then somebody's most steal it. But just give
us money for the thing that would make it. Yeah,
And of course the bubble burst and the entire economy
collapsed and the government had to resign. So like that
had happened about a century before, and people saw the

(06:38):
same stuff starting to happen again and they got like
really worried. Um, So the more level headed citizens in
England decided to make a system of rules and regulations
to govern the selling of stocks so the country wouldn't
be destroyed completely by reckless greed. And this is kind
of how the London Stock Exchange came about. And like
there's there's a lot more to the history than that,
but that's more or less the anyway. So you get

(06:59):
this stock exchanged by the eighteen hundreds and it regulates
trading and only approved entities could list commodities for sale
or sell commercial stock, so fraud was kept to a minimum,
which was good for the economy but bad for people
who want to get rich quick, bad for fraud, Bad
for fraud uh, So the London Stock Exchange worked for

(07:20):
a while to keep fraud in check. But then Napoleon
loses his war and British, the British wind up with
all of the money in the world, and that kind
of makes people reckless, so they start looking for schemes
that they can't find on the London Stock Exchange because
it's vaguely legitimate. And I'm gonna quote from the economist
here to explain what happened next. The economy was expanding steadily,

(07:41):
driven on by manufacturing. The cost of living was falling,
with industrial workers wages rising, Interest rates drifted down with
the government borrowing more and more cheaply. The country was
in an upbeat mood. The downside to all this was
that investing in government debt, a staple place to park
spare funds, had become boring. The market rate on the
most popular British government bond else steadily between eighteen hundred

(08:01):
and eighteen twenty five. The government made the most of this,
swapping its existing debt for new bonds that paid rates
as low as three percent. All this gave British investors
the incentive and the confidence to look for more exciting opportunities.
One option was to lend money to governments that paid
higher interest rates. Russia, Prussia, and Denmark all had good
credit records but offered a five percent return. So this

(08:22):
is what how it happens at first, as they start
investing in foreign companies that offer more of a return
than the government, and foreign bonds weren't traded in the
stock exchange, so there's no regulation. Now this is okay
when you're investing in like Denmark, because Denmark is a
real country and like, you know that your investment is
not going to just like fly away. Right Prussia is
not going to default on all of its debt. But

(08:42):
right at this time, like this, this is it's kind
of an open place where a scammer could establish themselves
and it's not a scam is maybe the wrong way
to put it. But less less set, less safe bets
start start being possible. Yeah, it's so all of these
South American colonies that we've been talking about had been

(09:03):
in the process of fighting wars against their colonial oppressures
and winning them. And you start wanding, you start having
independent South American states at this point, uh and and
these are very new countries and they just finished fighting
these horrible wars, so they had a need for a
bunch of cash. And all these people in Great Britain
are both obsessed with South America and they have too

(09:24):
much money. So you get this kind of like perfect storm.
And it starts with Colombia, which is the first new
nation that comes to the people of Great Britain asking
for a loan. They wanted two million pounds and this
is uh they offer, and like they're willing to offer
a six percent return rate, which was actually illegal in
Britain at the time because it's too high. Because it's

(09:45):
too high, and the government's like any any anything with
the return that high has to be somehow what's sketchy. Um.
But people fall for this and they like, they love it,
and they invest a shipload of money in Colombia. And
the way that Columbia has to like the country to
do this is Columbia. So they kind of go to
an effort to convince people that they're legitimate, that like

(10:06):
they'll be able to pay this back. So they print
up all these brochures with lists of like the revenues
they expect to make and how good their tobacco market's
going to be. And how much gold and silver they're
going to be mining as soon as the economy gets
off the ground. Uh. So it seems like a stable investment.
People go fucking wild for Colombian bonds and the bonds
run out almost immediately. Uh, and so people start like, yeah,

(10:27):
people are very hungry for another opportunity like that. And
so Chile comes up, and Chile is like, well, we
like alone too, and then Peru comes up next. And
by the time Peru starts offering investments, they're not even
telling people what natural resources they have to guarantee they're
they're they're just being like, hey, we're fucking Peru. You
guys want some of this ship And they guess correctly
that like London was, no one was going to factory

(10:49):
like we just like Colombia were just like know everything.
They said, that's what we're doing too in Peru. Just
give us the money. Yeah, we'll which of course we
probably have gold probably you don't know, soil, very rich
soil the other day. Anyway, give us. Now, these were

(11:10):
not necessary, These were not all great investments. Obviously, all
these countries do have natural resources, but Latin America was
still fighting a whole bunch of civil wars. All of
these countries were still fighting, like none of their governments
were actually really all that settled at this point. They
had no credit history, and nothing was known about the
resources of these places or when they would start being
the kind of seeing the kind of profits that all

(11:31):
these British people were going to expect. And it wasn't
even possible to truly vet that all the men claiming
to represent these governments were who they said they were,
So it's like, who, Yeah, none of these nations are
even recognized by the British governments. Now. I don't think
that's the only path to being legitimate is being recognized colonizers. However,

(11:51):
I do think it's fun that it's like, yeah, we
don't know who's going to be in charge tomorrow. We
are definitely yeah. And if you are a British and
vest and your country doesn't recognize this as a country,
that might be a sign that like, okay, this maybe
I should be a little bit more. I don't know. Yeah,
they invested a bunch of money in these places, um,

(12:13):
and this is the London that Gregor McGregor, the Prince
of Poier, walks into in eighty two. And the only
disadvantage he had when he was trying because he he
wants to do the same thing with Poier. He wants
to put it up for a bond issue and like
get a bunch of money from people who are expecting
it to be paid back. Uh. And the only disadvantage
he has in doing this is that Spain had never
owned his country. Um. So one reason British folks were

(12:36):
willing to invest in like Columbia or Peru is that
the Spanish had fought like hell to hold onto these places.
So even though they didn't know exactly what resources these
countries had, they figured if the Spanish are willing to
fight hard for them, there's gotta be yeah, exactly now.
So Poier didn't have that, but it had an advantage
that none of the Latin American countries issuing bonds in
Great Britain had, which is that its head of state

(12:58):
was in London, and its head of state is of
course Gregor McGregor. Yeah. So he immediately goes to the
press like that's his first thing, and he starts talking
about how like basically talking at Poier, is this like
utopia with with undiscovered riches and stuff? Uh, and he
he has. He hires a bunch of assistants to write
newspaper ads and leaflets and ballads to be broadcast by

(13:19):
like street singers in London and Edinburgh and Glasgow to
try to convince thing. Yeah yeah every day that rhymes
we bopping bottles and poier every day. Yeah yeah it
is ship yeah funk. That's good. So we have some
examples of some of the ads that he hired. This

(13:41):
one was published in the Glasgow Sentinel Sentinel and I'm
gonna read it now. The climate is remarkably healthy and
agrees admirably ably with the constitution of Europeans, many of whom,
having become much stabilitated by a long residence in the
West Indies, have been completely restored to health by a
removal for a short period to the Bay of Honduras.
The soil is extreme, the rich and fertile, bearing three

(14:01):
crops of Indian corn in the year, and produces not
only all the necessities of life and profusion, but is
well adapted for the cultivation of all those valuable commodities
which have rendered the West Indies so important, especially coffee, sugar, cotton, tobacco,
coco etcetera. So everything valuable grows here, and the climate
makes you healthier if you're Europeans, right, and everyone's coming

(14:21):
here to the island. Here, the land heals the sick.
Basically is what you said, Beautiful snake oil heels sick
white people, only white people. Don't worry, We'll only heals
sick white people. Well, you know, it's it's kind of
a thing. After this period, all the places where Europeans
are making all of their money by selling and mining
commodities kill Europeans and huge quantities because you know, they're

(14:43):
giving smallpox to the names, but like they don't have
immunity to like any of the local diseases either. So
uh yeah, there's a lot of reasonable questions that responsible
men asked about this investment scheme. For example, Gregor, how
do you pan to plan to repay this loan? And
Gregor answered that he had a lot of gold, and
it had all sorts of animals that could be hunted,
and it had great soil and soon there'd be a

(15:05):
bunch of stuff for sale. And so when he said this,
people were like, hey, Gregor, if Poyer has all this ship,
why has no one ever traded with it before, and
Gregor's like, well, the locals were too scared of getting
the Spanish attention and then Spain would colonize them, and
like they didn't want that, and so then they were like, well, well,
why why didn't Spain conquered Point, like they were right there.
And he was like, well, there's mountains too. There's all

(15:26):
these big mountains, huge, biggest mountain you've ever seen. No
one could get into it, and a really deep lake,
like the deepest lake, and honest, lots of lake currents, sharks,
lake sharks, tons of sharks, sky sharks too. Nobody could
get it. So these, again are all pretty transparent lies.
But nobody was checking him out because people just have

(15:46):
money to burn and they want to get in on
South America. So the loan that Gregor wound up seeking
on behalf of Poer was two hundred thousand pounds, just
a fraction of what larger nations had asked for, but
enough to make him very rich. It's the equivalent of
about like eleven million dollars or elevenillion pounds I guess today. Yeah,
it's a lot of money. So if Gregor had been
an ordinary con man, he would have focused on just

(16:06):
this grift. But by eighteen twenty two, Gregor had gotten
good at being a con man and the loan was
just his side grift. His real plan was to convince
hundreds and hundreds and eventually thousands of English and scotsmen
to sell their property by land from him and immigrate
to Poier to help civilize it. Now, I should note
here that there's some debate about whether or not he

(16:27):
actually intended to try to settle and govern a new nation.
There's some evidence that, like he did on emilya Amelia Island,
he wanted to move all these people out there so
they could form the core of a private country. Um.
But he never actually tried to do this. Uh, And
whether or not he intended to try and start a settlement,
the plan was a con from the beginning, and evidence
of this comes from the propaganda booklet he wrote to

(16:49):
entice colonists to immigrate. It was titled Poier Sketch of
the Mosquito Shore including the Territory of Poier, descriptive of
the country with some information as to its productions. Now,
he credited the writing of the book to Thomas Strange Ways,
a man who did not exist, but was supposedly a
captain in the Poie in military, which also did not exist.

(17:09):
That was his fake friend's name, Yeah, Johnny, fake name,
my good friend, Jesus. The booklet was a pretty good
piece of con art. It opened with an apology that

(17:29):
the contents were very dry and serious and wouldn't be
entertaining to ordinary readers, because he knew that the intelligent
and like serious men who would agree to invest in
Poier wanted only the best information. They didn't want it
to be flowery and interesting. They wanted serious facts, and
that's all he was going to give you. So, like,
first off, he's he's being like, oh, if you're not

(17:50):
really if if you're expecting like like a lurid read like,
this is for serious people. So like, clearly, if you're
into this, you're serious person. Book. Yeah, not for poland
dumb people, just the very smart. Yeah. So the book
was a bunch of included a bunch of like plagiarized
descriptions of different plants and like lies about the growing season,

(18:10):
and also these very elaborate calculations for how much farms
of different sizes and plantations of different sizes could expect
to earn and all of this was lies, but he
he did all like all of the math was laid
out in a way that like, oh wow, this has
to be legitimate. He did a bunch of math. There
are numbers in this leaflet. Yeah, and these calculations went
next to like things that were a lot less reasonable,

(18:32):
like claiming that like it had more fresh water than
anywhere else, and all of the freshwater rivers were also
just filled with hunks of gold that you could pick up,
and like it's this mix of like, yeah, it's very fun,
very fun. One question this point because he did inherit
land that wasn't there's real land. But there's real land.

(18:52):
That Poier is the location of the land that he inherited. Yeah, yeah,
you know what isn't fake land? Kind of grifted from
I don't know, Sophie, I don't know anymore. Let's just
roll the ads. Don't be sad, Robert. So we're back.

(19:22):
I missed the ads already, but we get to talk
more about Gregor McGregor. So. Thomas's guidebook included lengthy descriptions
of the local natives, the local poi Aians or the
poi Aians Poiasians. I think, Yeah, Poiaisians, I think is
the correct way. In his description, the Poisians basically had
no real culture of their own. Their culture was that

(19:43):
they loved the British. Yeah he knew, he knew how
to sell this ship. Like he's not dumb, he knows
his people. Uh. He wrote, quote you yeah, they love

(20:03):
they love you. Yeah, he wrote A tradition has long
prevailed among them that the gray eyed people, meaning the English,
have been particularly appointed to protect them from oppression and bondage.
That's his good grift. All the women are young and
the breasts are right underneath the chin, and all they

(20:25):
wanted to was marry an old, decrepit British men. Yeah.
The women won't very young men. They won't anyone under seventy.
So yeah, he tells them that, like, these people are
probably descendants of the Aztecs, so they're formerly civilized people
who needed English help to rescue them from barbarism. Oh god,

(20:47):
he was like, look, they were colonized once and they
loved it. They were like colonization chef's kiss and they
really wanted you guys to come back. Yeah. So um yeah,
he wrote quote they have repeatedly june An anxious desire
to acquire the arts of Europe as is manifest by
their repeated invitations to the English to form settlements among them,

(21:08):
as well as by their former offers to seed a
part of their country to Great Britain, there by showing
that their aversion to Spain does not extend to all
other nations of Europe. Yeah, I can't wait for you
white people to get here. They need Yes, they don't
know how to have a country without Yes, every indigenous population.
Where are the people? What do they get? But oh

(21:31):
we've got is this unspoiled country and like a culture
not based on constant toil, and like, ah, you know
what we really need is some incredibly filthy cities choking
to death on cold up scott If only we had
gold up Turlington to pull up, We're ready. So yeah.

(21:52):
He He also goes into length in this book about
like how how happy the natives are to be hired
for basically nothing, and how like, oh, you just give
them ammunition and they'll hunt all the food that you need.
They love doing it. Like and also you know if
you if you hire them and pay them, they never
want raises, like they're happy getting pay in the same
amount forever. They also want to be treated a second

(22:14):
class citizens. Oh, they love it. Can't get enough of
being second class citizens. You know what they said to
me the other day, They were like, what if we
had a system of segregation here, wouldn't that be grant said?
They said to me me McGregor, they said, we are
tired of opportunity. So he also lied about the present

(22:39):
extent of European civilization in Poyer, claiming that a forgotten
load of British settlers had already set up like a nice,
orderly European city in the country that was its capital.
Like there's already a white people city waiting for you.
All you gotta do is land there. You'll have workers,
you'll have a nice city with a bunch of comforts.
Like it'll be fine. All you gotta do is set

(22:59):
up your your your farms. They're ready to just be
planted and you can just get start making money. Right McGregor,
you said the city. You said the city is called
white people city. Yeah, white topia. It's full, full, full
full like nice white people things. It's got. I don't know.
John Mayer is always there. He never leaves White cod forever,

(23:22):
white conda. Oh, I love it condos as far as
the I can see burritos with no spices at all.
It's amazing that you thought that. Do you think I
said condo? Oh? I mean yeah, like Wakonda forever white Condah.
That's that's better. I thought you were making a comment

(23:42):
about white people's famous love of condos. Shaking her head.
So hundreds and hundreds of people sign up and they
all start paying him a ton of money for acreage.
He's he's making money hand over fist for this land
that these people had never seen. And the bulk of
his volunteer years were Scotsman. Because Gregor finally figures out

(24:03):
how to con his own people. Yeah, um, it's it
starts at home. Yeah. The historians have spent a decent
amount of time trying to tease out why Scottish people
were particularly vulnerable to this scheme, and there's an interesting
paragraph in the BBC on it quote. According to Columbia
University psychologist Tory Higgins, people are usually more likely to
be swayed by one or or other of the two

(24:25):
motivational lines. Some people are promotion focused they think of
possible positive gains, and some prevention focused. They focused on
losses and avoiding mistakes. An approach that unites the alpha
with the omega appeals to both mindsets, however, giving it
universal appeal, and it's easy to see how McGregor's proposition
offered this potent combination. He published interviews and national papers,

(24:47):
for instance, touting the perks that would come from investing
or settling in Ployer. He highlighted the bravery and fortitude
that such a gesture would demonstrate. You wouldn't just be smart,
you would be a real man. The Scottish Highlanders were
known for their heartiness and adventurous spirit. He out Pier
would be the ultimate testing ground, a challenge and a
gift all in one. Gotta love toxic masculinity. It's like,

(25:07):
are you going to move to Poier or is your
dick small? And yeah, I'm working on using that griff
like are you too much of a coward to get
into a gunfight with the FBA, f D A swat team?
Like oh, I mean, if you don't want to get
into a gunfight with the FDA, then don't move to
my compound and die for what's wrong with you? I mean,
that's what's wrong with you? Oh, you're a coward. No,

(25:28):
that's fine. It's cool to be a coward. That's cool.
Like you don't have like the cool people are gonna
go die fighting the f d A. You don't have
to because you're not cool. You can live the rest
of your life knowing that sera mass Yeah yeah, knowing
that you suck so uh. It is also speculated that
one reason the Scots were particularly interested in this is
that they were jealous of the English and all of

(25:50):
their fancy colonies, and there was also a manner of
honor at stake here. In the late sixteen hundred hundreds,
the Scots had tried to start a colony on the
Gulf of Darien near Panama, and it was a poorly
led ship show and basically everyone either died or were
conquered by Spain, and Scotland invested fully twenty of all
of its money in the scheme, which kind of destroyed
the entire country for years. So they were bad at

(26:14):
colonizing them. Yeah, yeah, it is nice about them. I mean,
they're good at being the soldiers of colonial oppressors, because
that's how the British did a lot of before. Before
they had African soldiers to fight for them. They had
Scotts to conquer the chunks of Africa and then hired
African soldiers to fight under Scottish officers. It's this whole
it's the whole thing. Yeah, they're not dumb, so uh yeah.

(26:39):
You would think that having been a part of this
like giant scheme that had crashed the entire economy and
cost a bunch of people their lives would have actually
built like a cultural immunity to schemes in Scotland. But
it just made them feel like they had a shame
to wipe out. And McGregor took advantage of that. He
pointed out that colonizing ployer would like, this will wipe
out the shame of Darien, Like nobody's gonna talking about
Darien because you're gonna up Poier. People are gonna be like,

(27:01):
oh those Scots, they're so good at colonizing. So gregor
was flooded with applicants and he happily set to work
hiring and refitting a small fleet of boats for the journey.
The first one set sail in September with seventy immigrants aboard.
These were to be the vanguard. They were there to
prepare the way for everybody else now. Gregor, of course,

(27:21):
stayed behind to prepare the next wave of ships, and
in his stead he promoted the most gullible of the settlers,
commissioning a former British Army officer named Hector Hall as
Lieutenant Colonel of the fictional second Native Regiment of Foot.
Gregor even generously made him the Lieutenant governor to and
granted him a twelve thousand, eight hundred acre estate that
again absolutely did not exists. You're king of everything, now

(27:45):
get to work. Now do all the stuff for me.
So the second wave of colonists would depart in November
after their ship was refit to carry two fifty people.
Uh and while Gregor waited, he designed and printed his
own poiis and currency and started handing it out to
colon in exchange for their gold from the land that
never was quote. The new world of their dreams suddenly

(28:05):
became a very real world as the men accepted the
kaseque's dollar notes with the coat of arms the crest
of the Bank of Poier and the promise that on
demand or three months after sight in the option of
the government to Poier, one hard dollar will be paid
to the bearer at the bank office in St. Joseph.
The people who had bought land and who had planned
to take their savings with them in coin, were also
delighted to exchange their gold for the legal currency of poet.

(28:30):
He loved to print the money, to print money. McGregor,
didya give me your real money? It's a it's a
good scheme. It's oh, you're you gotta get on a boat.
All that gold is heavy, you know, it's not heavy,
These totally real dollars. Oh yeah, real as hell they are.
So just as the refitting neared completion, disaster struck. See

(28:55):
the financial market that had gotten so bullish and investing
in all these south amera in bonds started to get
a little bit like antsy because the Colombian government basically
basically the Colombian government wrote a letter or something to
England being like, hey, you know the guy who's been
saying he's our representative, Like he didn't actually have the
right to to to ask for a loan. We were

(29:18):
not really sure what's going on here. So this worries
the people who had invested shiploads of money in Colombia,
and like a panic takes ahold of the market. Uh.
And this spreads to the holders of Chilean and Peruvian
bonds and they start to be like warnings in the
press that um, people might like, yeah, people might have

(29:39):
might be about to lose all of their money. Um.
So the bubble bursts and people stopped buying Gregor's bonds,
which he had not sold all of the bonds he
was trying to issue, so he's in a cash crunch. Now,
this didn't halt colonization because he had a bunch of
money that he had gotten from these people who are
buying fake land from him. Um. But so he had
to like rush along and send you know, hundreds of

(29:59):
people off on these two boats uh, and then travel
back to London to find a way to grift more money.
And it's funny the way he does this. He meets
this like British Army officer who's like a very rich
and famous man in London and offers him a place
to stay, and Gregor becomes good friends with him, and
he's like, hey, I'll make you the ambassador to poi
A if you like help me get some bank loans
and ship you can be the other king. So while

(30:25):
he's doing this. The first shipload of colonists land at
Poier in early and they were immediately surprised by a
couple of things. For one thing, there was no European
style capital right at the edge of the harbor like
the drawings that Gregor had showed them had depicted. In fact,
there were no signs, no roads, no buildings, no signs

(30:45):
of what they called civilization at all. And there's also
no signs of the friendly natives that they've been promised
were eagerly awaiting them. There's no people that they see
at first. The first wave of guys splash ashore and
they're just kind of baffled. The landes beautiful, but it's
completely undeveloped and there's no way to like there's no
clear way to make farms there. You'd have to chop
down hundreds of trees and like put in soil and everything. Like, so, yeah,

(31:08):
this would not have been an impossible task. Like obviously
you could have turned this land into land that had
farms and shipped on it if the expedition there had
been filled with people who were like ready to do that,
like a bunch of experienced woodsmen and young farmers who
like were were used to hard work and expecting it.
But the party that Gregor had sent to be the

(31:28):
first people in the poyer consisted of only a couple
of veteran soldiers and younger farmers with any sort of
experience with hard work. The rest of the party was
a mix of lawyers, artisans, a banker, and one young
man who Gregor had promised would be the first theater
director on the island of Poi. Yeah, there's yeah. And

(31:49):
there were some other farmers, but most of them were
old men who, like had hoped that they'd get to
retire in a place that Gregor had promised that Gregor
had told them that, like the climate employer extends, the
lie was of English people's. And then there were clerks
who were supposed to staff the empty government offices in
a capital that did not exist. So this was not

(32:12):
the crew of people you would pick to build civilization
from the ground up using nothing but hand tools, right Like,
these aren't the folks who are going to clear cut
forests and start farms from nothing. Oh my god, these
are the influencer girls. Yeah, these are a lot of influencers,
right Like, there's a lot of people who basically thought
like basically a lot of people who are like middle

(32:33):
class and upper middle class and who were told like,
you want to be aristocrats, you move here, you can
be like the new aristocracy of this new country. And
then like, ah, there's no country, sorry, but you are
still aristocracy. Look, you you can rule that tree. Yeah,
you can rule those leaves. You're the richest guy in
the woods, according to the fake dollars I gave you

(32:53):
that you can use nowhere. Because there's no one here
you cannot use. So there were people. There were natives,
and some of the natives were friendly, but others weren't,
and like none of them had any desire to work
for white people, like because they were doing their own thing.
They're like, well, like we're fine, we already have lines,
like what do you guys are all dying, Like we don't,
we don't want to, like nobody wants to take advice

(33:15):
from you. For white people to think that people want
to work for them, like, of course they want to
work for us, but nothing. Well, this is where we
get to the thing about this, that is this a
beautiful piece of historic irony because all of the white
men here, they weren't particularly bad within sort of the
context of their cultures. But they all had the same

(33:37):
thing that basically all white Europeans had, which is this
belief that like they inherently knew how to be civilized
in a way that other peoples of the world didn't,
and like, that's why they should take all this land
from these people, is they knew how to civilize it.
And so finally, a group of these people who believe
that they were who believed that they were going to

(33:57):
help a bunch of poor, non white people learn how
to be civilized, this group of people finds themselves in
a land that's actually truly wild and undeveloped, and so
it was like, okay, guys, like you're here, are you're
gonna make a civilization? Now? Can you do it? And
of course not. They all completely fucking collapsed because there
was nothing for them to just take over and steal.

(34:17):
They actually would have had to build civilization from the
ground up, and none of them were ready to do that. Right.
They're like, we did that once and then everything from
everybody else. Yeah, and we didn't, like people like a
thousand years ago did that once, and we've just been
kind of coasting, Like I'm gonna be honest. We stole
guns from China and it's been easy. So some of

(34:41):
this was the fault of the lieutenant governor who refused
to lead his party to higher ground and build permanent structures.
See midway through the unloading of the equipment, they brought
a storm and hit the coast, and the captain of
the boat that dropped them there used this as an
excuse to abandon them and sell the rest of their stuff.
And the governor, Yeah, the governor couldn't believe he had

(35:01):
been abandoned, and he wanted everyone to stay close to
shore because he thought a boat was coming back to
rescue them, that there had been some mistake. And he's
there is one there is like there is like an
actual town that's like a a several days journey away,
that's where like the actual king of the Mosquito Coast
is based out of. And like there's some civilization you
know by the European terms there, but it's not very big.

(35:23):
They don't have any interest in taking these people's money.
And they certainly like when they talked to this guy
who suppose has supposedly this king who supposedly made Gregor
prince and He's like, I don't know what the funk
you're talking about. Like I gave that dude some land,
but like I was not, like nobody, nobody wants you
all to civilize us, Like what do you what's what?
What's going on here? Yeah, so they're kind of fucked. Yeah,

(35:45):
you know who isn't kind of fucked though? The products
and services that support this podcast. Oh we're back. So
these people have just realized that they've been drifted um,
and that there's no country for them and that they're

(36:05):
alone in the wilderness with dwindling supplies um. And so
for months they did very little. They were just kind
of waiting for the second colony ship and a chance
to escape. Some of them hunted for meat, others dug
holes in the sand to collect semi drinkable water. Uh,
they didn't have any rum, which was used to clean
water back then. So everybody starts getting sick. And eventually
the second boat does arrive a lot with two d

(36:27):
fifty new colonists, and you know, they realized that something's
gone wrong. But the boat that took them wasn't hired
to take them back, and they didn't have any money
because their only money is fake. So they're all stuck
to um. So I had to try to finess on
that boat up but like y'all whatever is great, y'all
just go head up that way. Okay, I'm gonna go

(36:47):
to the boat. So they're they're a little fucked um
with all the new blood that's just come in. They
briefly try to like build permanent structures. They try to
chop down pine trees and float them on the river
down to their camp, which is a thing that like
people do. That's how you get big trees. That's how
you moved him in this period, And that would have
been a good idea if they'd known what they were doing.

(37:08):
But you said, you have to drain the pine resin
out of a tree like that before you can float it,
because otherwise it won't float. All their logs sink. So
they realized their mistake and they start tapping the resin
out of pine trees, which takes a long time and
doesn't isn't done before the rainy season, and because they're dumb,
they throw all the reson away rather than using it
to seal the roofs of the huts that they built,

(37:29):
because again they don't know what the funk they're doing.
So the rainy season comes and they all get soaked,
and they all get sick, and all their kids start
to die, and then the old people start to die.
The guy who got Like one of the real tragedies
is that there was a guy who Gregor Condon to
buying his way on, who was a shoemaker and was
promised he was going to be the first shoemaker and
all of POI like get to establish Yeah, which he was,

(37:52):
and he shot himself to death when he realized he'd
been gripped um blew his brains out with a musket. Yeah,
very sad. So all of the people who were supposed
to be in charge of this endeavor, all of the professionals,
the former military officers, the civil servants, the kind of
the people who are planning to be the aristocracy of
this new society, completely failed to take a hand in

(38:12):
building an actual survivable settlement. Instead, they vested all of
their hopes and the lieutenant governor who made regular trips
to the only settlement Poyer to try to find some
ship to take them home. They didn't. They just had
no interest in actually attempting to make the best of
their circumstances because they didn't know how to bring civilization
to a place. They just knew how to exploit people

(38:32):
when there was already civilization. David Sinclair writes, quote, they
had been led to believe that they would find homes
inter near a great city that was essentially European in
style and peopled by men and women like themselves, including
English and Americans, and the event the only people they
found living in Poyer, aside from the natives, were too
eccentric Americans named Murray and Winship, who had built themselves
a farm in the hills behind the Black Lagoon a

(38:54):
couple of years earlier. I kind of think those guys
might have been gay and just like escaping, Well, this
is just the like we're gay, the world's terrible, Let's
go live alone in the middle of nowhere on a farm.
Seems like, yeah, yeah, it's a good good I whish
I hope things worked out for them. I don't know
anything else about them, so it was hardly surprising then
when the likes of Colonel Hall, the civil servants, the

(39:16):
officer class, and the manager of the National Bank of
Poyer realized that they had been comprehensively duped. Their first
thought should have been to escape from the inhospitable wilderness
in which McGregor's deception had deposited them. On the other hand,
there can be no doubt that part of the tragedy
of Poier was the failure of the men, who, through
their societal position alone, would have been regarded as the
national leaders of the group, to adjust the uncomfortable and

(39:37):
dangerous circumstance created by McGregor's lives, and to show some
of the capacity for leadership that might have been expected
of them. Instead, when the conditions they found on their
arrival did not correspond in any way to those promised,
they took the view that because the authority conferred upon
them my McGregor was obviously as bogus as the country
he described, it was no business of theirs to try
to compensate for his betrayal. Basically, they totally dropped all responsibility.

(40:01):
When they thought they were going to be in charge
of a country that was already ready built, they were
they were ready to be responsible. When they realized they
were in a dangerous situation, none of them were willing
to do anything. They took all their badges off through
the jacket down. No, No, I'm not in charge of ship.
What are you talking about? Yeah, And there's there's a
part of this story that kind of reveals how fundamentally
hollow the social structure of the British Empire really was.

(40:24):
These colonists had been left in a bad position, but
not an unsurvivable one. They had a year's worth of
food rations, they had two doctors, medical supplies, tools and guns.
They could have built a survivable community, but they weren't
to community. They had no desire to be one. There
were a bunch of people who wanted to get rich
quick and make non white natives do all of the
hard work. As one survival survivor of the expedition, of

(40:45):
the expedition, James Hasty later noted, I do not wish
to say anything rashly, but instead of attending to make
us comfortable, it seemed as if everyone was for his
own hand, was in it for himself. Even the boards
and timber used for fitting up our births and the
ship were mostly sold or delivered. Basically like they had
this wood that was used to build births in the
ship that they took out of the boat when they

(41:06):
landed to build homes with. But instead of building homes,
the people in charge sold It's that they could buy
some manner of luxuries from the local like they're like.
Nobody took care of each other. It was just like
this complete. It was every man for himself. Now, A
couple of the braver souls left to make a five
mile journey to a British colony in Honduras to try
to get help. And this was noble for them, but

(41:27):
it meant that like the most decent and competent men
in the whole expedition weren't there anymore. So by the
end of April, as James wrote, quote, sick sickness and
despondency was so general that few were able or willing
to make any exertion. And I am sorry to have
to have to add that many of those who were
still well plundered instead of assisted their sick brethren, and
likewise plundered the public stores of anything they could conveniently

(41:50):
lay their hands upon. They robbed them. They were planning
to rob other people, they wound up robbing themselves, and
in the end more than two thirds of them died
just a couple of months. Yeah, the traumatized survivors were
eventually rescued by a passing ship, which was fortunate because
as they were rescued, Gregor had dispatched five more ships
filled with like a thousand other people men, women and

(42:12):
children to a colony that had become a graveyard. The
British Navy was thankfully able to recall these boats before
anyone else died. Sending people over there, of course he was.
He's a grifter. He ain't done grift. Maybe he thought
the first people would actually just buck up and start
building something so that by the time the other people

(42:32):
got there they saw something in progress that did not happen. Yeah.
If I keep sending people over, eventually it will be
true that there's a settlement there. He's not wrong, Yeah,
because they'll die otherwise. Yeah. So, by autumn of eighty three,
the story of what had really happened at Poyer had

(42:53):
hit London, and McGregor's response was to do what McGregor
did treat. Yeah. He fled to France, where he tried
to do the same trick again and it tried to
get more colonists to go to Poier. He he got
about sixty people to sign up and pay him. But
even thankfully, like Paris isn't that far from London, the
authorities there figured out what was happening, uh, and they

(43:14):
got they got wind of what was going on really
when French settlers started applying for passports to a country
that wasn't real. So there's an investigation. He gets imprisoned,
but being McGregor, he's able to kind of get himself
out of incarceration. But that was his last trick. Um.
He was left in financial debt to his investors, and
his repeated attempts to find more buyers for his fake

(43:35):
POI Asian bond failed to sell for some inexplicable reason.
He tried to go back home to Edinburgh, but he
was caught by some of the people he'd coned and
he was forced to flee Scotland for the only place
that would accept him Caracas, where he was still a
war hero and his status is that guaranteed him uh
kind of a place to live basically, but not much more.

(43:55):
He died penniless in December of eighteen forty five. Wow, Yeah,
he had come up so much. If you hadn't just
go to that last I'm gonna sell y'all a break country.
He could have just lived his life out rich dollars
are proud like, wow, ye can't stop, won't stop, can't

(44:19):
That's that's the scammer thing, right, That's how they all
get caught, because like, you have to be able to
walk away. It's like gambling. You have to know when
you're up. You just gotta. That's how you win at gambling.
There's no other way to win a gambling but leaving
deep well, plug your pluggable. Speaking of scams, yeah, it

(44:41):
would be like robbery. You like company scam got his podcast.
You could buy me a d I V A l
A c I DVA Lacey on all platforms, Robert, when
they find you, Oh no no, I can't be found Hills.
That's when I thought, yeah you can. You can. You
can find this podcast at Bastard's pod on all the things. Yeah.

(45:08):
H h m hm